September 20, 2007

Traveling cognito

One of MRP’s favorite billboards along the Mass Pike came down this week. There won’t be any picture because to get a photograph would have required some MacGyver-like skills that I just don’t possess, so you’ll just have to bear with me.

Well-documented that MRP really likes most Volkswagen advertising campaigns and this one is no different. It’s for the Eos, which is apparently some kind of convertible. On one side, you see an Eos with the top up and the word incognito. On the other side, you see an Eos with the top down and the word cognito.

Well, cognito isn’t a word you can find in the dictionary, but I thought the idea was really clever and creative, and it works. The use of the word incognito gives riding in an Eon a certain sense of glamor. If you want the paparazzi to know you’re driving by — traveling cognito, as it were — you just put the top down.

What other words like incognito don’t — when they lose their prefix — make another word?

UPDATE 9/27: I heard a good one today, “There was some ambiguity and there was some . . . biguity.”